The paper describes the World Wide Web Index and Search Engine (WISE) for Internet resource discovery. The system is designed around a resource database containing meta information about WWW resources and is automatically built using an indexer robot, a special WWW client agent. The resource database allows users to search for resources based on keywords, and to learn about potentially relevant resources without having to directly access them. Such capabilities can significantly reduce the amount of time that a user needs to spend in order to find the information of his/her interest. We discuss WISE's main components: the resource database, the indexer robot, the search engine, and the user interface, and through the technical discussions, we highlight the research issues involved in the design, the implementation and the evaluation of such a system